Sunday, February 7, 2010

Some of you may have noticed that while you can get precompiled binaries of Sigil for Linux in x86 and x64[1] flavors, you only have an x86 version for Windows. Why? Well Microsoft made very a good job ensuring that 32 bit applications still run on 64 bit Windows. So there was no need for x64 Sigil. On Linux, it’s slightly different and nowhere near that easy.[2]

So what are the main benefits (from an application’s point of view) to the newer instruction set/architecture?

The application has access to a larger address space (both physical and virtual),

Registers are 64 bits, not 32; this allows better/faster 64 bit math,

Double the number of general-purpose registers,

Double the number of XMM registers,

SSE instructions can be safely used knowing that all x64 CPU’s have to support them.

And several other things. The drawback is that your compiled code is now larger: pointers are all 64 bits, but the caches on the CPU’s are the same size. This is a big issue.

In the end, whether you’ll see direct performance improvements from moving to x64 depends entirely on the application. Some will, but some won’t. The Visual Studio devs have chosen not to make the transition just yet. I know other developers who have stated that their apps also behave worse on x64.

So you have to profile it to know for sure.

I used to think Sigil wouldn’t benefit from x64, performance wise. But then there was that nagging feeling telling me I should test it and see. The main reason why I didn’t want to do this is because I’d have to setup an entire new build system, with an entirely new Qt etc., etc. I already have four: Win x86, Lin x86, Lin x64 and Mac Universal. And building Qt (AGAIN) takes about five hours. You basically have to sit in front of the console, watching green text fly by because it likes to flake out in the middle and then you have to start it again. Not my ideal way to spend an afternoon.

But today I came down with a fever so I was too weak to do anything useful anyway. I may as well sit dozing in front of a screen. So I did.

Many hours later, after I got everything compiled and working, I set out to test Sigil 0.1.8 in x86 versus the same in x64. The test would measure the time it takes to load an epub book, from start to finish (this is easily the longest running operation in Sigil 0.1.8). I chose three epub files, did five runs for each on both versions, recorded the times and voila!

The x64 version was consistently 10% faster.

So my assumption was wrong. In light of these results, the next public release of Sigil (which should be 0.2.0) will in all likelihood include an x64 version for Windows.

In other news, I’ll be getting the 2010 version of Visual Studio when it ships in two months, for several reasons. But it will also provide tangible performance improvements for Sigil, since MSVC10 C++ compiler optimizations have improved. That’s another 10%.

And then there’s Sigil 0.2.0 and multithreaded, multi-flow loading. Now if only Nokia could get QtWebKit in a respectable shape…

Footnotes

[1] Some say “64 bit”, some “x64” or “x86-64” or “AMD64” or “Intel 64” and they all argue which is the correct one… I don’t care. I’m calling it “x64”, since that’s what people around me seem to be using. You know what I mean: the 64 bit extension to the x86 instruction set that AMD came up with and then Intel licensed.

[2] Also, Linux users tend to yell a lot more when their needs and/or desires are not met. Believe me, you don’t want to know.